Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008

Did you know?

Rackstraw Downes began as a painter of geometric abstractions, under the influence of his Yale School of Art teacher, Al Held.

This is the first major survey exhibition of paintings by the British-born, Yale-educated painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), who divides his time between New York and Texas and has been painting exterior and interior panoramic scenes of the American land- and urbanscape for over thirty-five years.

The exhibition consists of approximately thirty-two works, many of them multiple-part paintings, created between 1972 and 2008. Downes’s panoramic paintings strike a unique balance between realism and abstraction, timelessness and history. He paints exclusively from direct observation over a period of several weeks to several months, outdoors or indoors, but always onsite, using a portable easel.